Inspired by the hand lettered phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” in a 1923 promotional blurb for Speedball lettering pens, Pen Nib Western JNL recreates the decorative style of this vintage artistic gem in both regular and oblique versions.

The sheet music cover of Lew Brown and Albert Von Tilzer's 1917 wartime song "Au Revoir, But Not Goodbye (Soldier Boy)" had its title hand-lettered in a condensed sans serif design with the influence of Art Nouveau styling. This has now been re-drawn digitally as See You Later JNL.

The title on the cover of Street & Smith’s “Wild West Weekly” for Jan. 27, 1934 made for an interesting contrast in terms. Here was a pulp magazine dedicated to stories of the Old West, but its title was hand lettered in an extra bold, squared shape style using a round pen nib – not exactly an alphabet that represented cowboys and desperados… This aside, this type style made for a good digital font revival, and it is now available as Bold Pen Lettering JNL in both regular and oblique versions.

Peas In A Pod may be a cute font, but this type has a plethora of uses. Its use of thick and thin lines makes it a wonderful display font or an easy-to-read body font.

To blend a handwritten style with a graphical aesthetic, Monotype designers paid attention to the balance between the two, hence harmoniously combine their qualities like a mix of tradition and modern. M Felt Pen references the unified stroke thickness and rounded terminals of rounded Heiti typefaces, imitating the fluidity of marker writing. The linked strokes are vivid and suggest the presence of the human hand.

The idea started with the 1934 sheet music of “Mazurka Amabile”. Its hand drawn title had most of the letters rendered in a rectangular shape [‘square’ in the sign trade] that featured rounded corners and terminals made by the shape of the lettering pen nib. A few letters were rounder in design than others, so those were scrapped in favor of a more consistent character shape throughout the font. Pen Nib Square JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

If you're regularly compelled to scrawl fiery French poetry, declare independence, or design indie folk albums, then Chris Watson's romantic Steel Pen typeface is for you. With old-school edge and spirited opentype alternates, it's as gallant as type gets.

To blend a handwritten style with a graphical aesthetic, Monotype designers paid attention to the balance between the two, hence harmoniously combine their qualities like a mix of tradition and modern. M Felt Pen references the unified stroke thickness and rounded terminals of rounded Heiti typefaces, imitating the fluidity of marker writing. The linked strokes are vivid and suggest the presence of the human hand.

The hand lettered credits from the 1931 melodrama “Safe in Hell” inspired the typeface Pre Code Movies JNL, which is available in both regular and oblique versions. The design is strongly influenced by the popular Art Deco style of thick-and-thin characters and also features rounded corners. The font’s name comes from the early era of talking pictures and the short period before the establishment of the Hays Office in 1934 when Hollywood did not self-censor itself. Many then-taboo topics were exploited on film until Will Hays cracked down on such productions. To read more about Pre-Code Hollywood, visit the Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Code_Hollywood

The 1920 edition of “How to Paint Signs and Sho’ Cards” by E. C. Matthews offered a number of examples of then-modern lettering styles for sign painters and show card writers. A bold display alphabet made with a round lettering nib is now available as Show Card Pen JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

The hand lettered title on the cover of the 1938 sheet music for “If It Rains – Who Cares” featured a condensed Art Deco typeface made with a round nib pen. The square shaped characters with rounded corners were a perfect subject for a digital font revival, and are now available as Dip Pen Deco JNL, in both regular and oblique versions.

A 1935 song with the unusual title of "Dinner for One Please, James" had its title hand lettered on the cover of the sheet music with simple, condensed letters made by a round point dip pen. This has been reproduced in a digital font as Pen Lettering Sans JNL, and is available in both regular and oblique versions.

The Face2Face (F2F) series was inspired by the techno sound of the mid-1990s, personal computers and new font creation software. For years, Thomas Nagel and his friends formed a unique type design collective, which churned out a substantial amount of fresh, new fonts, none of which complied with the traditional rules of typography. Many of these typefaces were used to create layouts for the leading German techno magazine of the 1990s, Frontpage. Nagel and his fellows would even set in type at 6 points, in order to make it nearly unreadable. It was a pleasure for the kids to read and decrypt these messages! F2F EI Dee Cons one of 41 Face2Face fonts included in the Take Type 5 collection from Linotype. Nagel designed nine of these himself."

Any prototype you can imagine, Skolar Sans can materialise. This industrious type family is more than just a versatile partner for our award-winning Skolar collection: it is a true sans-serif type system envisioned for the age of responsive design. We developed Skolar Sans to accommodate contemporary typographers and the challenges they confront: an ever-changing spectrum of outputs and devices, in which serious typography can get lost. Skolar Sans is engineered to cope with complex editorial texts and data-rich layouts alike. Its construction is designed for easy reading, and its subtle personal style and a touch of flourish. From gently thin to black, the finely-tuned weight variants will fit any composition from wide-screen dashboards to compact mobile editorial designs. Its four subtly graded width variants allow you to fit any page context with comfort. The 72 styles; 36 weight and width variants in uprights and true italics with ligatures, arrows, scientific figure variants, and fleurons. The two variable fonts (one for uprights and one for the italics) allow user precise navigation of the Skolar Sans design space and streamline delivery. The linguistic scope of Skolar Sans PE is an exact match to Skolar PE: Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek (including polytonic) scripts and support for hundreds of languages and transliterations.

The two great technical constraints a type designer can tackle are low resolution, which limits detail and dictates proportions between negative and positive shapes, and uniform width, which restricts each letter to a fixed horizontal space. Wrestle with both at once, and each letter becomes a black-and-white chessboard that challenges every design decision. Sometimes battling these constraints gets in the way of a good idea, but other times, tinkering with fewer options can make the job irresistibly easy and lead straight to a grid addiction. Gridlite, an experiment with a modular negative space, is the side effect of such an addiction. It’s simplified, monospaced, and variable: foreground and background alike are ready to be animated, typed, scaled up, scaled down, rounded, or otherwise deformed. Gridlite is primarily a variable font with axes that control the size of the elements, their shape, and the background (one for the rectangular field and one for the compact envelope around the letters). The fonts cover Cyrillic, Greek, and Latin scripts. Small caps are included, for no apparent reason ... and there is a monospaced elephant, too.

Clone Rounded is a retrofuturist typeface by Lasko Džurovski from Macedonia, fusing the vintage look of CRT monospaced forms with the organic mutability of a multi-weight, proportional family fit for reading. This lovechild of cyber-culture and genetic font modification takes inspiration from coding, technology, and architecture. Its quasi-monospaced design gives a nod to the quirkiness of engineered fonts but bends enough to never sacrifice a natural reading experience. Biomechanical morphology augmenting a laboratory-built frame.

The LCT Ragnarök is inspired by the cinematographic universe. Its thick and generous shape makes this typeface naturally stand out. In addition, its lines embody soft serifs thus adding elegance to it. This original font endows two styles; regular and slant. It is an asset for the creation of titles, logos or even generics. LCT Ragnarök encompasses a rich alphabet going from Latin PRO going to Greek , Polytonic Greek and Cyrillic.

A quill pen-like joined script typeface which echoes the cartoon lettering of 17th Century court papers during the period of the English Civil war. A nifty feature of this font is that if you enter a vertical bar '|' character, it will turn off the exit stroke of a joining character.

Okay, ya finally wangled yer widget out from between the framistat and the whatchamacallit, ya assembled yer Avengers and ya hooked up yer hoojamajigger to the doohickey. But ya still ain't gonna get yer contraption to work until ya plug the widget into the thingamajig! Sheesh! Wotta Revoltin' development!

Before the Great War, there were great posters. Posters of elegance and grandeur. Posters calling people to the pleasures of sunny southern France and to the perfections of northern Italy’s dolce vita. Le Havre, based on a poster by AM Cassandre, was one of my first typefaces that took inspiration from this genre. Now, the golden memories of years past are the inspiration for insigne design’s new Gineso Titling as well. Gineso revives the retro forms of past poster design with its newly crafted sense of humanity, which is amplified by a great variety of texture options. While the new forms are perfect for posters, this titling font is also ideal for bringing the charm of pre-war Southern Europe to a new bottle of wine, to fine foods and beverages, and to high-end logotypes. For the grandeur and elegance you need in your titling, look to Gineso Titling.

Alles Kaputt means ‘everything’s broken’ in German. I always wonder why my stuff breaks so easily, especially my mobile phones (I have had 7 in the last two years). Maybe I am careless, but I believe that there is a more or less scientific explanation that chaos and destruction are far easier than harmony and creation. I am no scientist, so don’t take my word for it! Alles Kaputt is a nice script font. I made it with a felt tip pen I borrowed from the kids. Use it for texts on product packaging, book covers and websites. Or, whatever you fancy!

Morning News is the sister font of Evening News which I designed some years ago for use with my local newspaper Abendzeitung. Morning News is an adaption, a little bit rounder, which gives the font a much softer touch. The general design dates back to the pre-Hitler era, the time when Germany had already lost the first World War and was taking a short deadly breath to start the second big war. Lets hope there will be a day when there will never be another war in Europe (or elsewhere!). Another new peaceful font by your pacifistic designer, Gert Wiescher.